See excerpts
here.
OK--there is no denying the graphic novel has been used successfully in the past to process and examine traumatic historical events. Most successfully and gracefully, in my opinion, by Art Spiegelman in his
Maus series about his parents' Holocaust experience.
But I can't decide how I feel about this new adaptation of the 9/11 Report by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. It's not the subject matter that throws me. In fact, speaking of
Maus, Spiegelman is also the author of
a graphic novel about his experience as a New Yorker in the aftermath of 9/11 that seemed appropriate.
But Spiegelman's
In the Shadow of No Towers was an intensely personal account. The 9/11 Report graphic adaptation somehow comes off as weirdly dissociative, perhaps just because it is based on a factual, objective, third-person document. As in, what's next,
9/11: the video game? Is this part of the trend of experiencing history and current events as an audience rather than as actors?
Fewer and fewer people are civically engaged, yet cable news networks have bigger and bigger audiences. (cites on this coming later) Our president, who I hear has just finished Camus'
The Stranger, may understand what I mean when I say: like Meursault after killing the Arab on the beach, we are watching situations that we help create unfold before us as if we are merely observers.
Yup, you heard it here first: 9/11 Report comic book = national existential crisis.
Have any of you ever actually attended one of these things? For some reason I have always had the sneaking suspicion that you would go in burned out and unmotivated, and come out believing in Scientology.
